The Great Plague. The Story of London\'s Most Deadly Year

228 • Surviving

benevolent dictator, a somewhat awesome mysterious figure, wielding un-
limited powers.” Pepys was less flattering, characterizing him as a “block-

head” in meetings he dominated without any give and take. Evelyn kept his
opinions to himself.^24
At the highest levels within Greater London, the thin web of authority
was holding, if imperfectly, against the triple threats of disease, dissenters,

and Dutch prisoners. The great testing ground of London’s ability to survive
this crisis, however, remained the local parishes.

Men and Women at Work

The city chamberlain from time to time, until further order, [is] to issue and pay

out such money as the Lord Mayor shall direct towards releife of the poore visited

with the sicknesse.

—London Court of Aldermen, September 21 , 1665

In the spread-out metropolis, action at the highest levels of authority could

only fill the cracks of neighborhood functions—supplying the all-important
communal burial grounds, for example, and supplementing needy parish
budgets with a vital transfusion of extra money. The most immediate and
crucial needs were at the level of the individual parishes. Parish leaders ap-

pointed the emergency personnel who kept London from collapsing into
utter chaos as they went out on their rounds.
The miracle was that the line of service in the parishes held firm. To be
sure, someone usually volunteered to take the place of a fallen workman or

woman, for any job was better than none. But the smooth changeover was
due to more than workers desperate for a job. Churchwardens and overseers
of the poor chose carefully among the applicants, arrived quickly at a pay

scale, and swore them in without any further ado. At Saint Bride’s, common
laborers offered to serve if any gravedigger or bearer should fall victim to the
infection. Saint Margaret’s pesthouse called in a midwife four times in one
week to deliver babies. The same parish paid two women on several occa-

sions for their “extraordinary pains” in performing unspecified labors (proba-
bly as caregivers in their own homes for parentless children and other survi-
vors of plague tragedies).
Nurses were in great demand. Young women who had lost their spouses

(and bread winners) to plague swelled the ranks of the normal nursing pool